Cloud technology has swiftly transformed the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry and is starting to make inroads in more classical industries, such as manufacturing and mining. While cloud technology has provided the benefits of reduced capital and operating expenditures, some of the challenges for industrial applications are different from traditional ICT applications. Further, industrial applications have stronger timing and availability requirements. For example, controlling a set of collaborating robots on an assembly line or coordinating vehicles in a platoon will demand tighter computational delay requirements. In particular, tail latencies are of special interest as the maximum response time will limit possible performance of an industrial application. In order to extend the cloud concepts beyond the ICT domain and apply it to mission critical use cases such as industrial automation, transport and health care, performance predictability and guarantee of a particular use case should be defined. Further, cloud providers give few or no guarantees with respect to latency and timing of their systems in general. While this is typically not an issue for traditional ICT applications, it poses challenges for industrial automation and network processing. For example, FIG. 9 illustrates a traditional distributed control system with delays. See Johan Nilsson, “Real-Time Control Systems with Delays,” Ph.D. thesis, 1998. A sensor node samples the output state of the process and transmits it to a controller node where the next control signal is computed and transmitted to an actuator node. The times delays τkca and τksc substantially influence the control performance. With current 4th Generation of Wireless Mobile Telecommunications (4G) technology, each of these delays is typically in the range of thirty milliseconds (30 msec.) to one hundred milliseconds (100 msec.) or longer. With the introduction of 5th Generation of Wireless Mobile Telecommunications (5G) technology, these delays are expected to be reduced to a few milliseconds or less.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved techniques for managing computational resources such as in time-restrained industrial applications. In addition, other desirable features and characteristics of the present disclosure will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and embodiments, taken in conjunction with the accompanying figures and the foregoing technical field and background.
The Background section of this document is provided to place embodiments of the present disclosure in technological and operational context, to assist those of skill in the art in understanding their scope and utility. Unless explicitly identified as such, no statement herein is admitted to be prior art merely by its inclusion in the Background section.